Genarlow Wilson: Update

The Georgia State Supreme Court now has the ball in its court: to find a way to release this young man from a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for having had consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager (He was 17; she, 15) or to let him rot behind bars when not only his lawyers say this is cruel and unusual punishment but so does almost everybody else – including members of the prosecutorial side.

The former legislator who sponsored the bill that became an anti-child molestation law in 1995, told the court: "The General Assembly never intended for the Child Protection Act's harsh felony sentences designed to punish adults who prey on children to be used to punish consensual sexual acts between teenagers close in age."

No one has come up with a face-saving way to rectify this situation – even to free Wilson, now 21, on bond while “the wheels of justice” move ever so slowly and judges prepare to take off the month of August for vacation and politicians run for cover.

See my posting on this subject from earlier this month.

Poverty

While John McCain's presidential campaign is suffering from a poverty of ideas in which he really believes and that the conservatives he is courting really believe, John Edwards is touring some of the poorest areas of our country and, reminiscent of Bobby Kennedy, reminding us of how too many of us live. His message is about "presidential failure and governmental neglect." Sometimes celebrity, even political celebrity, is a good thing. Check out this site and all the links, which make my point:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12017456

People may poke fun at Edwards, a rich man, focusing so much attention on the poor, but I say: God bless!

Ultimate Perp Walk of Dumb and Dumber

Start with stealing a luxury SUV from a car dealership to which they were connected. And then move on to shooting two NYPD officers who had pulled them over after verifying that the plates on the SUV were not registered to that SUV. And then fleeing, leaving behind the vehicle, shell casings, unfinished fried chicken dinners from a fast-food joint and guns traceable to them. Despite a circuitous route, they were easily tracked in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania. Dexter Bostic and Robert J. Ellis earn the title of Dumb and Dumber. Throw in an “alleged” if you want. They, and the driver of the SUV (the boyfriend of Bostic's sister apparently), were identified from surveillance video. Those chicken plates yielded fingerprints and DNA. Bostic and Ellis both had ties to a car dealership from which the SUV had been taken. They were caught woefully unprepared as would-be hikers in the Poconos. Ellis was pulled from bushes with a jar of peanut butter.

As I watched their mug shots being telecast while they were on the lam with a reward pool of at least $64,000 on their heads and then after watching them, apprehended, being trotted out for the cameras, all I could think was: Heaven help them.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says that all the resources of the department will be used to see that justice is done. But the police officers, especially the colleagues of Officers Russel Timoshenko, 23, and Herman Yan, 26, are in a vengeance-is-mine mood, especially because Timoshenko is paralyzed and on life support from being shot in the head. This is a telling sign, from The New York Times today:

“Officer Yan’s handcuffs were placed on Mr. Ellis’s hands. Officer Timoshenko’s had been used on Mr. Bostic earlier. ‘It’s an important symbol, and I think it shows that this is a very close-knit organization,’ Mr. Kelly said."

The perp walk is designed to humiliate and intimidate a suspect in a crime with extensive media interest. Law enforcement gets to show off its work; the hungry press is satiated; the rest of us, supposedly, can breathe a sigh of relief that we and the streets are a bit safer.

So, in a carefully choreographed show, and at an appointed time, the cops bring the suspect to the precinct or out of the precinct en route to an arraignment – a first appearance before a judge to determine basic details about the case, about the suspect, etcetera.

The ultimate perp walk took place in Brooklyn yesterday. Not only were reporters and photographers present for the show outside the 71st Precinct, but also were dozens of NYPD officers, men and women in blue, many of them black, forming a phalanx, there to let Dumb and Dumber know that, as that Sting song goes: “Every breath you take/And every move you make/Every bond you break, every step you take/I'll be watching you.”

They have a serious whipping in store out of view of the public. That’s the way the system works. So, with that in mind and as much as I think that Dumb and Dumber are reprehensible, their civil rights must be assured. Let’s be vigilant and, while holding our noses, demand that they be treated fairly.

Genarlow Wilson Needs Your Help

If you aren’t familiar with the name, check out my piece at BET.com, under “news.” The long way to find the piece is to use this link:

http://www.bet.com/NR/exeres/4927A8FA-C78B-4A7F-BA42-580C489DAD91.htm?

Wilson behaved rather irresponsibly when he was 17 and, at a raucous party in 2003, had oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. No one – not even the girl’s mother – denies that the sex was consensual. But under a law then in effect in Georgia, Wilson was charged with child molestation and was ultimately sentenced to a mandatory 10-year prison term in 2005. If he did the same thing today, the maximum sentence he would face is a year in jail. Even though the law changed last year, it does not cover him.

Of course, something CAN be done about that if enough people pressure the right people. These include:

Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker, Office of the Attorney General, 40 Capitol Square SW, Atlanta, Ga. 30334. Phone: 404-656-3300. Fax: 404-657-8733.   

Douglas County District Attorney David McDade
dmcdade@co.douglas.ga.us
Phone: 770-920-7292
  
According to the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, various officials say they are afraid that freeing Wilson – though it’s the right thing in his case – would “open the floodgates” and lead to chaos in the criminal justice system because other sex offenders would demand reconsideration of their cases. But, Warnock notes, of the roughly 1,300 sex offenders behind bars in Georgia, only seven involve people who were minors when prosecuted and not all of those seven were involved in consensual sexual acts.

“It just boils down to basic politics,” Warnock said of the officials hiding behind the old law and passing the buck – while Wilson remains in prison with an uncertain future.

AL SHARPTON’S STRATEGY

For everyone who wonders why Al Sharpton is in the public eye as a Black civil rights Superman when so many others are accomplishing so much more in a less flamboyant way, I recommend reading an online article in City Hall (www.cityhallnews.com) by Edward-Isaac Dovere.

A couple of snippets:

“Cynics say, ‘He plays the media,’” Sharpton said. “But if I play the media toward the end goal, that’s saying I’m competent.”
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Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama are among those doing the math. Both want his presidential endorsement, and Sharpton has been making them wait. Both could benefit enormously in public perception from the reverend’s backing—Clinton by cementing the foothold in the African-American community her husband enjoyed in his own presidential runs, Obama by using it to help dispel a disconnect some prominent African-Americans have described feeling toward him. Both have made very strong appeals.

One thing many assume is weighing on Sharpton’s mind is jealousy of Obama, a worry that the Illinois senator’s ascendancy might mean that Sharpton gets eclipsed on the national political scene.

Sharpton dismisses this notion.

“We’re both athletes,” he said. “I box, he plays baseball. I mean, it’s different parts. It’s crazy.”
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[ I kind of get his point. Scary!!! Actually, as anyone who knows Obama knows, he plays BASKETBALL!!]

April 15: When All Hell Broke Loose….

...not just in baseball (See Red Barber's book by this name), but in US society. Sixty years ago, April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first Black man to play in baseball’s Major League in the modern era. We have to add that “in the modern era” because long before the 20th century, Blacks played professional baseball with White folks, just as Blacks were jockeys in the big-time racing circuits.

He was 28 years old. When he died at age 53, many people said that baseball and the stress of being the first, of being abused initially by not only fans and opposing team players but by his own teammates, of having to ever be the gentleman and not strike back, cut his life short.

Jackie Robinson, No. 42 for the Brooklyn Dodgers, forced the US to deal with its racism. To this day many older Blacks are fans of the Dodgers (now the Los Angeles Dodgers) because of Jackie Robinson.

In honor of his accomplishments on the field, many Major League Baseball players and coachs -- and the NY Mets' manager Willie Randolph -- will wear No. 42 today (Apr. 15).

But to really appreciate Robinson, one must know about the man off the field, the man who challenged the status quo in a segregated Army prior to his baseball career and challenged the economic status quo after his baseball career by helping found a bank for Black people in the 1960s. He was a prominent participant in the 1963 March on Washington. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson to bring yourself up to speed on Robinson if he’s not in your pantheon of people to be admired and whose spirit and courage are worth emulating.

Martin Luther King Jr.:A Sobering Anniversary

Today marks the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis while supporting the efforts of sanitation workers to achieve dignity and better working conditions. He has been dead as long as he was alive. 39 years.

In that relatively short, Jesus-like lifespan, he accomplished so much. From the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he was there in the lead of a nonviolent army. He reluctantly took on the role of public leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955; he so eloquently expressed his -- and Black America's -- dream in August 1963; he just as eloquently, but not so well publicized, expressed the nightmare that was reality after four young girls were killed in the terroristic bombing of a Birmingham church later in 1963. King connected the dots between a fall-off in federal budgetary support for President Johnson's War on Poverty and his escalation of the war in Vietnam. What a parallel to what we are experiencing now, as the US pours billions into Iraq, pallets of which have disappeared, unaccounted for, but can't get its act together on resurrecting Gulf communities this long after Hurricane Katrina!

King's works and his philosophy, his challenges and his courage should be on our minds every day as we vow to do our very best to make this a better world.

Honors for First Black TopGuns from WWII

For a younger generation, the name Tuskegee may not mean all that much. But for people at least my age – 51 – it stands for much. It is the Alabama town where Booker T. Washington founded a school now known as Tuskegee University. It is where the federal government shamelessly abused Black men in an experiment observing the effects of syphilis while withholding medical care.

But it is also where a unit of young Black airmen formed what became known as The Tuskegee Airmen. That President Roosevelt (with the prodding of Eleanor Roosevelt among others) permitted the airmen to be trained to fight in World War II was itself a milestone, but the record amassed by those fighter pilots and their support team was even more historic.

At long last, they are receiving their due – those who are still alive, that is. Each day, as with all WWII vets, their numbers decline. But a few days ago 300 of them and their family members – coming from New York, Missouri, Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, Georgia and Florida, among others states – were honored at the US Capitol with the rarely given Congressional Gold Medal.

"To my heroes, so many of you have said thank you," Rep. Charles Rangel told them during a ceremony that included Congressional leaders and President Bush. "It doesn't work that way. We cannot say enough thank-yous to you." Rangel, from Harlem, and Sen. Carl Levin, from Michigan, sponsored a bill to award the airmen with the medal, first presented in 1776 – to George Washington.

Bush told them: "I would like to offer a gesture to help atone for all the unreturned salutes and unforgivable indignities. And so, on behalf of the office I hold, and a country that honors you, I salute you for the service to the United States of America." He actually pulled off a pretty crisp military salute.

We should all salute them -- as well as the contributions many of them went on to make to their communities in civic affairs, in politics, in business, in education.

50 Shots; Black Man Dead

This has been disturbing from the first, when Sean Bell, a young man literally hours away from his wedding ceremony in November, was gunned down by five cops who for some reason thought he was something other than a young man leaving a strip joint with friends on the eve of his wedding.

Apparently three cops have been indicted on charges of manslaughter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/nyregion/17grand.html?hp

This won't be official until Monday. But officials -- elected and appointed and self-appointed --have been encourgaging US to be cool, to chill, to not go mau-mauing no matter what the results.

OK. But let's also put ourselves in the shoes of cops on the beat in a bad neighborhood trying to make the nabe safe for all of US. This is not an easy issue, is it?

The Cherokee Nation's "Ethnic Cleansing" Is Not Acceptable

I could not believe what I was learning: The descendants of Native Americans who once owned slaves and later under a federal treaty and other legalities, made the slaves and their descendants citizens in the Cherokee Nation, were stripping them of their rights. The audacity! The racism! The greed! See how the official Cherokee newspaper, The Phoenix, reported this: http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/News/News.aspx?StoryID=2480

The New York Times explains some of the background to this in a Mar. 8 editorial (www.nytimes.com):

“This bitter dispute dates to the treaties of 1866, when the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek agreed to admit their former slaves as tribal members in return for recognition as sovereign nations. The tribes fought black membership from the start — even though many of the former slaves were products of mixed black and Indian marriages.

“The federal courts repeatedly upheld the treaties. But the federal government fanned the flames when a government commission set out in the 1890s to create an authoritative roll of tribal membership. Instead of placing everyone on a single roll, it made two lists. The so-called blood list contained nonblack Cherokees, listed with their percentage of Indian ancestry. The freedmen’s list included the names of any black members, even those with significant Cherokee ancestry.”

The actual election results – 3 to 1 for expelling descendants of slaves from membership, including access to health and educational benefits as well as any profits from tribal gambling enterprises -- can be seen at the official tribal site: http://www.cherokee.org/TribalGovernment/Election/home.aspx?section=ResultsSE&year=2007

At www.indianz.com, Tim Giago offers an explanation, but reaches, as far as I am concerned, an untenable conclusion. See: http://www.indianz.com/News/2007/001790.asp

We sometimes gloss over the complicated history between Native Americans and Black Americans. But, since attending a journalism convention some years ago in Atlanta, where journalists of color – including Native Americans and Blacks, among others – I have never forgotten how the Cherokees in their capital city, New Echota, thought of themselves as White as any “actual” White Southerners. (http://gastateparks.org/info/echota/) Now some of them are behaving like the Whites in the Thomas Jefferson family who refuse to acknowledge Black descendants of Jefferson, refusing them such benefits as membership in various Jefferson societies and the right to burial on the Jefferson estate in Virginia.

Of course, there are dissidents among any group. So there are members of the Cherokee Nation who are fighting against the expulsion of the Cherokee Freedman, just as some White Jefferson family members challenge the exclusion of Black Jefferson descendants.

A member of the Cherokee tribal council, Taylor Keen, has been quoted in various newspapers as saying: “This is a sad chapter in Cherokee history. But this is not my Cherokee Nation. My Cherokee Nation is one that honors all parts of her past.”

Now it is up to the courts, and perhaps the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, to prevent this injustice being perpetrated by a people who should recall how much the tribe suffered when forced out of Southern states in the 1800s. The Trail of Tears, this episode was called. Now, perhaps the way that abused children often become abusers, the Cherokee Nation is promoting a 21st century version of that Trail of Tears.

Bloody Sunday, Part Two

If this was a competition, Barack Obama won in the Bloody Sunday Showdown in Selma, Alabama, today. No question.

Hillary Clinton gave a speech at the First Baptist Church. Barack Obama Jr. gave a politically-tinged sermon at the Brown A.M.E. Church, which was headquarters for the March 7, 1965, march for voting rights that ended in the beating and battering and tear gassing of the participants. He paid homage to the “Moses generation,” some of whom were in the congregation: the men and women who did so much to lead Blacks out of bondage but never quite made it to the Promised Land.

"We are in the presence today of a lot of Moseses. They are giants whose shoulders we stand on. They are people who battled on not just the behalf of African Americans, but on behalf of all Americans for America's soul....Like Moses, they challenged Pharoah, powers who said that some are on top and others are at the bottom and that's the way it's always going to be."

His is the “Joshua generation,” he said, tasked with the obligation to continue the journey and to move in directions the Moses generation could not even have imagined. "It's because they marched that the next generation hasn't been bloodied so much" and has excelled in many fields, including politics.

Not so subtlely silencing his critics about his racial identity, he recounted the life story of his Black grandfather, still called a "houseboy" when he was in his 60s in colonial Kenya and required to carry a passbook to get from one place in White-controlled Kenya to another part. But he dreamed and passed on his hope to his son, Barack Obama (Sr.), who benefitted from a US program to bring Africans to the US for education and to repair the American image abroad as a result of the well-publicized injustices and brutalities of the civil rights era. The possibilities for the Obamas changed "because some folks were willing to march across a bridge."

"So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched for our freedom."

His message, beyond connecting his family’s racial odyssey and his own to the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was not that different from Clinton’s. They both said that the march must continue.

“We have to finish the march,” Hillary said. “That is the call to our generation, to our young people.”

"There are still some battles that need to be fought, some rivers that need to be crossed," Barack said.

And referring to God's message to Joshua, Barack admonished his listeners to “Be strong and have courage.” Blacks seem to be warming to that message.

The NAACP Is At It Again...Lost!

This news comes from the Associated Press today: The president, Bruce Gordon, who was hailed as the next great wave of leadership of this venerable civil rights organization, has given up -- and quit.


NAACP President Resigns After 19 Months
By ERIN TEXEIRA
The Associated Press
Sunday, March 4, 2007; 2:57 PM

NEW YORK -- NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon is quitting the civil rights organization, leaving after just 19 months at the helm, he told The Associated Press Sunday.

Gordon cited growing strain with board members over the group's management style and future operations.

"I believe that any organization that's going to be effective will only be effective if the board and the CEO are aligned and I don't think we are aligned," Gordon said. "This compromises the ability of the board to be as effective as it can be."

He spoke by phone from Los Angeles, where he had just attended the taping of the NAACP Image Awards.

Dennis C. Hayes, general counsel of the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is expected to serve as interim president, Gordon said.

Hayes filled the same role after Kweisi Mfume resigned the presidency in 2004 after nine years.

Gordon said that while the NAACP is an advocacy organization, it needs to be more focused on service and finding solutions.

"I'm used to a CEO running an organization, with the board approving strategy and policy," Gordon said. "But the NAACP board is very much involved."

© 2007 The Associated Press